I look out at the cars in the parking lot of the Palmyra.
At tiny stars like stations of the dead.
Scent of cardamon sends up its genies from the restaurant.
What does it matter who threw the black-and-white tv?
Turned off the heat? I have been here before.
In rooms, painted with the leftovers. Rooms
where pamphlets piled outside the door. Repent!
Where I passed out on a bed that was a pullout.
Rooms that used to be a nunnery until I gave up
all my situations, put my toe into a slipper, felt
my way into the dark I’d painted into corners.
Leftfoot right, like an ambition.

There’s a chair like a window, waiting in the corner
by a desk. Sit,
the chair says, as if I were a wick.
A candle to a basking. A bulb that burns past midnight.

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